This week we spent most of our time working on the suction pump and trying to brainstorm ideas on a perfect housing for it. Sometimes when the nurses are pumping the fluids from the patient they forget to monitor the bottles as a result, the fluid can overflow and then damage the pump. This is a major problem nurses are having with the current suction pump. Besides, they are the most widely used devices, hence there is need for a control system to monitor fluid overflow. So far we have come up with two ideas:

1. Using Infrared sensor: So we will have a transmitter on one side of the bottle and fix a receiver on the other end. So with no fluid in the bottle, the receiver gets light from the infrared LED. But with fluid reaching the set level of the sensors the light will be blocked thereby activating a buzzer. Simply that’s how the circuit is expected to work.

2. Using Ultrasonic sensor: Ultrasonic sensor can be used to measure distance by transmitting sound waves and then reading the reflected wave from any surface .The distance varies with the level of the blocking object. So our assumption is that with the fluid rising from the bottle during pumping process. The distance will be varying too. With some programming we can set a point to which a buzzer can sound.

We have done a number of trial circuits, and we still are right now. The good news is that the infrared sensor design looks promising and efficient as compared to the ultrasonic sensor. This is so because with the ultrasonic sensor there is need for new bottle covers which have a hole so that we can fix the sensor and that’s not very practical.